The future of religious broadcasting, a topic that will be discussed at synod in a few weeks time, is something that affects more than just the BBC. Attending "religion in the media" dos it becomes plain that pretty much all religious voices feel poorly represented by what they call the media. I want to take that perception with a huge pinch of salt, because in an open society it isn't the function of professional journos to represent any religious leader's point of view accurately so they won't have to, but to report on what's going on clearly and accurately. In a media environment with no middle men, religious leaders should learn to speak up clearly for themselves, and take the consequences. They shouldn't expect the BBC to do this for them, because it can't and shouldn't. Yet, the fact that a whole range of religious leaders representing every major tradition in the UK feel chronically misunderstood must mean something. No smoke without fire.

In extenuation, it has to be admitted that religion is a dimension of human existence that is almost impossible to represent readily within the conventions of the journalistic Meccano that characterises much English media output. To understand religion you have to look beneath surface realities. In defence of journalists, and drawing on one example which is not (quite) unique, there is informative journalism out there. I think of Deborah Orr's encounter, as an atheist, with the Alpha Course. She actually conducted an interview and attended a real course, both of which experiences she described critically but first-hand (in the Independent) with good humour, insight, and a playful sense of give and take. More recently, Adam Rutherford performed a similar exercise for this website.

Such pieces are few and far between, compared to, say, a reheat piece from, of all things, a school magazine, reproduced uncritically from the National Secular Society website, that had a canter round the paddock on the Times blog last week — sourced from a brilliant teenager who writes well but hadn't actually attended the course she was criticising. There isn't even a follow-up, or attempt to see how the writer got on with the course when it actually happened. And that's news? No, but it's a cheap way of getting the words "Alpha" and "cult" into the same headline without a lawyer's letter.

In fact, I write from South Africa and as soon as you step outside the cosy conventions of the Home Counties, you encounter a world where the priority and meaning of religion is entirely different. Go to a barrio in Latin America and try to put across the vibrant potency of its Pentecostalism: there is just no way of describing that experience in a way that conforms to the bourgeois conventions of much English journalism. Almost alone in the world, it just doesn't do God, doesn't know how to, or want to know how to.

Ironically, the step outside wouldn't have to be very far. London is, in fact, a world city full of vibrant religious expression and growing churches. A trip to the Kensington Temple would be quite an education. But it's almost impossible for central figures in the media establishment to take such phenomena seriously, perhaps because when they were at public school many of them had religion all sewn up around about the fourth year. The kind of people they dine with just don't do that sort of thing. It's obvious that sneering is a suitable substitute for analysis. That's all there is to it.

Now for the BBC. In fairness, the media landscape within which the Beeb operates is very different from that of a few years ago. I was most impressed this year by Diarmaid MacCulloch's BBC4 History of Christianity — great telly within the conventions of TV donnery, intelligently presented, and tackling the issues from a fresh perspective. It is no disrespect to Professor MacCulloch's work to say that it can't amount to as much as it would have, even on BBC2, 40 years ago when there were only three channels. That's hardly the BBC's fault, but it must tackle the problem if it is to fulfil its brief to serve the public, and, quite apart from that, if its viewers and listeners are to have any kind of basic understanding of the real issues and causes when stories with a religious dimension occur in the normal news round.

Otherwise the sole representation of unfashionable forms of religion that motivate millions in Britain, and hundreds of millions around the world, will simply be the token Jesus Freak on Big Brother, one quarter understood by a grinning Davina MacCall. Don't knock it, though. It's better than nothing.